In short, these are complimentary things. Think about it like this: you use aspire to define the pieces which your app is comprised of (services, databases, etc), and that includes your Orleans silos & clients. Aspire lets you configure clustering once and then pass it to the services which consume it - rather than having to configure clustering identically in every silo & client app, for example. Here's an example of the work-in-progress: https://x.com/reubenbond/status/1724479093247549470?s=20
We should chat more about Reminders v2 - I want to learn more about what you'd like it to provide. Can you comment on the issue (https://github.com/dotnet/orleans/issues/7573)? If you'd like to see some of what is in the works, please message me on Discord and we can chat more about it (https://aka.ms/orleans/discord)
There were a bunch of new features added to Orleans in the past year, including Live Grain Migration, IAsyncEnumerable support, Cosmos DB & Redis providers.
I think workflows (durable async/await) are more useful than Reminders v2 alone (in some sense, workflows are Reminders v2), but an enhanced reminders system is likely part of that, as is the new log-structured storage system. The log structured storage issue discusses this: https://github.com/dotnet/orleans/issues/7691. We've been experimenting with a programming model for workflows and intend to share that more broadly soon. Currently, we are planning for .NET 9, so feedback is welcome (best provided via GitHub rather than here). Aspire will make it easier to build and deploy Orleans apps, which is one of the harder points for people getting started with Orleans currently.
I used it to test an idea I had to implement the Fast Paxos optimization on top of CASPaxos and it was quite useful for that: https://github.com/ReubenBond/fast-caspaxos (the code is bad, it's just an experiment)